This book begins, mutatis mutandis, at its end: a mystery solved; a body healed. The hastily written, faded recipe, hidden on the final folio of BL Additional MS 61823, The Book of Margery Kempe, has puzzled scholars of Kempe since the rediscovery of the manuscript in 1934, lingering in a tantalising lacuna of illegibility (Figure 1). Perhaps aptly, the British Library's multispectral imaging equipment – the same technology employed in space exploration to capture data about the earth's surface and the universe, that is, Creation itself – has enabled the faded handwriting of the manuscript's recipe to be deciphered (Figures 2 and 3). The recipe, annotated by a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century reader, probably in a monastic context, is for medicinal sweets: curative digestives known as ‘dragges’ that were commonly used remedies for digestion, employed to dry and warm a cold, phlegmatic stomach. It calls for plentiful sugar, itself considered medicinal in the Middle Ages, and the luxuriant spices of aniseed, fennel seed, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, and liquorice. Given Kempe's attendance at many meals with ‘worthy’ folk, it is inconceivable that she would not herself have eaten dragges. The Middle English translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum (written c. 1240), a medical text that circulated widely in the fourteenth century, notes that sweet flavours are pure ‘by kynde [nature]’ and beneficial for bodily health. Sweetness is restorative, softening the body with moisture: it ‘restoreþ in þe body þinge þat is lost, and most conforteþ feble vertues and spirites, and norissheþ speciallich all þe membres’. The spiced sweetness of the recipe is, then, at once therapeutic, sensory, symbolic, and salvific, since the moral properties of food were also imbricated with its ingestion in medieval culture. By consuming a foodstuff, one would acquire some of its associated properties (the Eucharistic wafer, for example).